Process control and PLM in the limelight at daratechPLANT2006 conference
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 3/1/2006 7:00:00 AM
A record turnout of professionals from the process and oil & gas industries gathered in Houston in late January for the daratechPLANT2006 conference. The event presented a timely review of best practices, evolving operations, and emerging technologies.
Considerable attention was placed on boosting plant engineering productivity in capital asset-intensive sectors during a period when executives must find skilled workers to design, build, and maintain technology-dependent operations.
"The core challenge is an overwhelming lack of skilled resources," says Charles Foundyller, CEO of Daratech, a Cambridge, Mass.-based research firm specialized in product life-cycle management (PLM), adding, "The lack of skilled resources is probably best tackled by increasing engineering productivity—that is, getting more out of what you have."
The conference stressed the importance of interoperability to enable collaborative responses to competitive challenges. Several companies were on hand to describe initiatives aimed at fostering collaboration.
"We identified a considerable lack of skill," says Brian Chang, chairman and CEO of Yantai Raffles Shipyard, of a new venture he started in Yantai, China. The company specializes in prototype plants or vessels used for oil extraction, processing, and offloading. "Owners always want slightly different [versions] than the last one, so challenges are significant," he says.
In response, Yantai put in place a comprehensive PLM initiative based on PLM vendor Dassault Systemes' suite of products, including CATIA for 3D design, DELMIA for operations simulation, and ENOVIA for collaborative engineering management.
Chang claims the initial feedback from many customers was, "We encountered very senior people who, after visiting us, said, 'Your engineering department is overkill for our project.'"
But Chang proved them wrong by eliminating budget overruns and meeting schedules in an industry where "a $10-billion project might carry a $10-billion overrun," he says. "With PLM, we are able to do more simulations and get validation by owners, vendors, and ourselves before we start cutting steel. This reduces a lot of risk." It also greatly boosts knowledge capture and reusability of design.
For Hugh "Tad" Fry, manager of engineering for St. Louis-based brewery Anheuser-Busch, laser scanning is the "sustaining technology."
Says Fry, "Laser scanning can capture 'as built' specifications of anything it can see. It's high-speed, high-definition data capture that is crucial for a 100-year-old company seeking to migrate to new production technology. We don't have original design drawings for some of our 100-year-old plants."
Fry hired a service company to scan facilities using Leica Geosystems' high-definition scanning technology that, when coupled with 3D engineering software, can generate a 3D model of existing operations down to 1/8-inch accuracy. This provides the design platform overlay to refit a facility with new production equipment without costly rework to resolve physical space conflicts.
